Marbury Defends Michael Vick

Aug 23, 2007

RUSH: Stephon Marbury — this is last Monday night in Albany — said this about Michael Vick.

MARBURY: They don’t say anything about people who shoot deers and shoot other animals. From what I hear, dogfighting is a sport, it’s just behind closed doors. I think it’s tough that we build Michael Vick up and then we break him down. I think he’s one of the superb athletes and he’s a great human being. I just think he fell into a bad situation.

RUSH: Yeah, well, people look at it that way. Stephon Marbury’s quote is an illusion of that. It does go on behind closed doors and the feds and all the other investigators say it’s really tough to crack these things, these dogfighting rings, and that they proliferate quite numerously all over the fruited plain, ladies and gentlemen. We have a reaction from PETA on the Today show today. Matt Lauer was talking to Ingrid Newkirk and the NAACP Interim President, Dennis Courtland Hayes. Matt Lauer said, ‘Mr. Hayes, if Michael Vick were a white quarterback, star athlete, a Peyton Manning, would we see the same amount of attention, the same amount of negative comments, the same amount of protests from people like PETA?’

HAYES: What we have to understand is the backdrop. We have to understand that what we’re hearing expressed by some African Americans is their anger and hurt, distrust in a criminal justice system that they feel treats them like animals.

RUSH: Ah, come on!

HAYES: No dog deserves to be mistreated, and blacks and Hispanics don’t deserve to represent a majority of our prison population in this country while blacks and Hispanics represent only one-third of the population.

RUSH: Absolute non sequiturs. By the way, I didn’t hear a defense of Michael Vick in there, did I? Wouldn’t go that far, but no dog deserves to be mistreated, blacks and Hispanics don’t — what does that have to do with this? How in the world is Vick being mistreated here? Oh, it’s just a sport, yeah. Well, if it was a sport, and they were gambling on it, what else is Vick gambling on? These are the questions that the team, the Atlanta Falcons, and the league, the NFL, have to worry about. What else might he be gambling on? Who are these guys he’s running around with, and what kind of influence do they have on him? There are all kinds of unanswered questions about this even beyond the dogfighting business. Here’s Ingrid Newkirk of PETA. Matt Lauer says, ‘Ms. Newkirk, Stephon Marbury, as you just heard, compared it to deer hunting, said he doesn’t know that it’s any worse. I think I know, but how do you come down on that?’

NEWKIRK: PETA, of course, opposes deer hunting. Only 7% of the US population goes deer hunting. But you don’t douse deer in water and then electrocute them and beat them to death and slam them into the ground, and you don’t build pits in your backyard for deer to fight. So if somebody is so mad as to say that there’s an absolute comparison, they’re wrong. They’re both cruel sports, or can be if you’re not a good shot, deer hunting. But dog fighting is a world unto itself. It is blood and guts, it’s a —

LAUER: Do you think there was, Ingrid —

NEWKIRK: — cowardly pursuit.

RUSH: So the controversy here thickens and swirls.

RUSH: Marv in… By the way, I am disappointed in some of you people. Those of you sending me e-mails, I will explain this in the next hour, but you people sending me these e-mails about Clinton and having lied again, you obviously are not listening, because we did this yesterday. We beat everybody on this by a day. (sigh)

Anyway, Marv in Redding, welcome to the EIB Network. It’s nice to have you with us.

CALLER: Thanks, Rush.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: I had a comment regarding Stephon Marbury’s comment. I don’t — I don’t condone beating or mistreating animals in any way. I love dogs. They’re my favorite animal. They’re man’s best friend, by the way. But I can understand some of his logic. If you think about horse and dog racing, in horse racing, they use a whip to force the animal to the finish line, and then if he breaks a leg, they euthanize him — and we also, when you talk about electrocuting these dogs, we still electrocute human beings. So, I mean, I understand his rationale. I don’t agree with him, but I understand where he’s coming from.

RUSH: Yeah, and we electrocute pigs in the slaughterhouse, too.

CALLER: Well, and a lot of people have never been to a slaughterhouse. I have been.

RUSH: So have I.

CALLER: If you’ve been there, you know exactly how unhumane [sic] that is. So like I said, he’s saying something that a lot of people probably think but don’t want to say, because they love their animals too much. I’m one of them.

RUSH: I know. People don’t have horses in the house. You know, they aren’t that kind of pet.

CALLER: That’s true.

RUSH: They don’t have pigs in the house — and in this country, they don’t eat their dogs.

CALLER: Well, yeah, we don’t eat the dogs, but they do eat them in most of the Asian countries, so…

RUSH: We haven’t descended yet to that necessity.

CALLER: Not yet.

RUSH: But animals, these dogs, even these pit bulls are considered by a lot of people — because we make pets these dogs — to be the essence of innocence. Any dog, not just a pit bull. When I was out in Wyoming on Monday, the cutest — I had never seen one of these dogs — a miniature greyhound, and it was like an eight- or ten-week-old puppy, and it was just the cutest little thing. I know a dog is man’s best friend and all that. I’ve had both dogs and cats, and I can tell you, totally different. Dogs have masters. Cats have staff.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The guy who called and said he sorta understands what Stephon Marbury was saying. I didn’t get a chance to respond to that because of the constraints of time. We were heading into what is known Inside Baseball-wise as a hard break, meaning I can’t miss it or else. But let me just say, Stephon Marbury is a moron, folks. He’s just a flat-out moron and not helping the situation here. As for the caller who talked about how we euthanize horses who break a leg in the middle of a race, yep, we do. They cordon them off out there, get the pistol out, bang, bang, unless it’s one of these — what was the name of that horse they tried to save? Barbaro — because of the incredible potential there with the stud fees. There was a nationwide love affair, attraction with this horse, so they tried to save the horse. It looked good for a while, but he eventually didn’t make it. The point is we do not torture horses that lose races. Just because they lose we don’t sit around and cordon them off and right there on the track bang, bang, you’re dead, which is what Vick and his boys were doing.

If you want to say that dogfighting is a sport, fine and dandy, but that’s totally unnecessary, and there’s nobody in this country who understands it, wants to understand it, or can sympathize with it. As for the slaughterhouse, yeah, I’ve been to a slaughterhouse. I was on a field trip in grade school, and there was a slaughterhouse there in our little hometown of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. I admit it was shocking. What we saw that day was pigs. They electrocuted them with two prongs right in the back of their heads, and then they’d gut ’em and hoist ’em up on the conveyor belt. We saw all of this. I had a range of emotions. Keep in mind I’m just a young, innocent whippersnapper, and we had dogs at home. I said, ‘Oh, God, I’m never eating ham again. I’m never going to eat bacon again.’ That lasted about a day. What I eventually concluded was, because it was a lot of hogs, what I concluded, to show you my thought process early in life, we’re going to need a lot of these damn things if we’re going to do this to provide food for ourselves and so forth. Obviously it’s true. But we don’t raise pigs to kill each other. We don’t do pig fights. I’ve always thought some of these people doing cockfights with these roosters and stuff is&hellip; I know that’s cultural, too, as some people say, this dogfighting business is. But it’s nice to know now that NBC and Matt Lauer have finally got the NAACP on board. We finally got the NAACP in this. I wondered how long it was going to take.

By the way, I forget who wrote this, it was a columnist, I was looking at the ESPN NFL site today, because I do it habitually when we get close to football season, and I forget the guy’s name, but he takes Gene Upshaw, who is the executive director of the NFL Players Association union, takes him to task for not standing up and at least supporting Vic’s right to play despite all of this. The baseball union, the basketball union, whatever happens, they’re in there fighting for the player’s rights to pay and continue to be paid. But Upshaw going silent has formed a silent alliance with the new sheriff in town, the new commissioner, Roger Goodell, and this guy is afraid that Upshaw has lost his union over this, which, frankly, is a bit crazy. So the NAACP weighs in. It’s from the Today Show today. Matt Lauer talking to Dennis Courtland Hayes, who is the NAACP’s interim president and CEO. Here’s the question: ‘Mr. Hayes, if Michael Vick were a white quarterback, star athlete, a Peyton Manning, would we see the same amount of attention and the same amount of negative comments, the same amount of protests from people like PETA?’

HAYES: What we have to understand is the backdrop. We have to understand that what we’re hearing expressed by some African Americans is their anger, hurt, distrust in a criminal justice system that they feel treats them like animals. No dog deserves to be mistreated. And blacks and Hispanics don’t deserve to represent a majority of our prison population in this country while blacks and Hispanics represent only one-third of the population.

RUSH: So much to react to here, this is a veritable gold mine. In the first place, he’s trying to convey the impression to the gullible that watch this show that the way Michael Vick treated his pit bulls is the way African Americans are still treated in this country. Make no mistake about it. How else do you interpret it? When he says no dog deserves to be mistreated, and blacks and Hispanics don’t deserve to represent a majority — do you think, Mr. Hayes, that who ends up in prison is because of a lottery based on prejudice and race? I guess they do. They cannot possibly think that, Snerdley. So you’re telling me that a large percentage of the African-American population in this country believes that who ends up going to prison is a lottery, and you’re more likely to get picked and sent to jail if you’re black because this is still 200 years ago and slavery is still running rampant and this is how it’s manifesting itself?

Well, I’ll tell you what, that’s pretty sad and it’s no wonder these people are continually upset and angry. They keep voting for the same people that do nothing for them, while promising every two to four years to do everything for them. I’ll tell you what, the NAACP is on the scene. They finally have been dragged into the Michael Vick thing. Forget about failing schools, forget about lack of reading ability, forget about ability to graduate from high school, forget all of that, oh, yeah, we’ll slough that aside, gotta stand up for Vick now. They’ve come a long way. Wrong direction.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: As to this business, this bite from the guy at the NAACP is really amazing. So Michael Vick’s being railroaded, eh? And you say, Mr. Snerdley, that they actually believe that? When he is on the verge of confessing to crimes, he’s about to confess to crimes, what’s being railroaded? They must think that just the fact that they pursued him is racist. What treatment? He could go to trial, he could say, ‘I’m not guilty.’ He could go for an O.J. jury. He could say, ‘You know what, I’ll go for jury nullification. I don’t care what these witnesses are going to say. I’ll go in there, I’ll try to take advantage of this thought that people are out there trying to railroad me because of the color of my skin,’ but he didn’t decide to do that, did he?

He went in there and he’s going to plead guilty to something on Monday, and what he’s going to plead guilty to are crimes. And, you know what? He’s not going to do as much jail time on the fed charges, anyway, as if he went to trial. One of the reasons is because his famous-athlete status is helping him to a certain extent here. You have to look at it from that standpoint after you acknowledge he is going to confess to some crimes. Now, when you confess, I don’t know how you get railroaded. If you’re being railroaded, you’re innocent, and you can go before a jury and you can say, ‘I’m being railroaded here and I’m being singled out,’ for whatever reason you want to try to advance part of your defense. I don’t see any of that happening. So this railroaded business is a typical narrative or template from the NAACP, but it doesn’t wash with me.